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This paper describes the interactive problem solving support offered by our adaptive educational hypermedia system called MATHEMA. The general goal of the MATHEMA is the support of senior high school students or the beginners of higher education, through an interactive and constructivist environment, in learning physics (electromagnetism) individually and/or collaboratively, and to overcome their possible misconceptions and learning difficulties. Initially, a review of related work about the implemented AEHS/ITS and the didactic design principles of the MATHEMA are presented. Through the interactive problem solving, the system supports the students in solving electromagnetism problems, individually and/or collaboratively, by following an activity that is based on the experimentation with simulations, explorations, guided discovery, and collaboration didactic approaches. An experimental study with senior high school students showed that they improve their performances when following this activity. A questionnaire that we gave to the students to express their opinion about our system helped us to improve the quality of the courses.

In this paper we describe the Web-based adaptive educational hypermedia system called MATHEMA. In general, the MATHEMA is a learning system that dynamically generates courses in electromagnetism according to students’ learning goal, knowledge level, performance, learning style, abstract or concrete dimension of learning style, preference for visual and/or verbal feedback, preference for the kind of navigation, and preference of using or not the navigation guidance. The MATHEMA supports the following adaptive and intelligent techniques: curriculum sequencing, adaptive presentation, adaptive navigation support, interactive problem solving support, and adaptive group formation and peer help. Also, the MATHEMA supports meta-adaptation in the navigation of learners.

Knowledge management has received great and ongoing attention during the last decades. The amount of knowledge and the interest for knowledge exploitation has been the spark for numerous attempts and proposals concerning knowledge representation, storage, usage, querying, acquisition and deduction. Ontologies offer an intuitive and expressive tool for these objectives. In this paper we propose an integrative approach and we present a software tool architecture that supports dynamic knowledge representation and exploration in a simple yet expressive manner, offering advanced querying and navigation abilities supporting the goal of knowledge exploitation and development, without presupposing deep modeling experience.

Internet based teaching is well established under various contexts. WWW based virtual interactive books are used for this purpose. Using WWW browsers students can study such books locally or remotely. Enhanced by Java TM applets, such books provide an interactive as well as a traditional approach to learning. Examples and exercises implemented as applets cater for both observation and exploration. Such a book, addressing the topic of data structures, is being developed as a teaching aid for a first year Computer Science students. Theory is presented in a hyperlinked textual form thus realising cross references, while examples and exercises are visualised as interactive Java TM applets.

Bayesian Networks are one of the most popular formalisms for reasoning under uncertainty. Hierarchical Bayesian Networks (HBNs) are an extension of Bayesian Networks that are able to deal with structured domains, using knowledge about the structure of the data to introduce a bias that can contribute to improving inference and learning methods. In effect, nodes in an HBN are (possibly nested) aggregations of simpler nodes. Every aggregate node is itself an HBN modelling independences inside a subset of the whole world under consideration. In this paper we discuss how HBNs can be used as Bayesian classifiers for structured domains. We also discuss how HBNs can be further extended to model more complex data structures, such as lists or sets, and we present the results of preliminary experiments on the mutagenesis dataset.

The role of the Internet in today’s information world can be considered as one of an agora, a French pre-revolution cafe, or simply an unlimited source of information available to everyone on request. The beneficiaries of this information availability are many. Academic issues as well as everyday discussions may make use of the world wide web to promote debates, raise issues of interest, put forward concepts and ideas, and generally contribute to the proliferation of knowledge even at the most remote location on the globe either as a blue ribbon medium or as a moderated discussion forum. This increasing information availability, on the one hand, and demand, on the other, pose a very important question: what should computer scientists do to make this worldwide spread of information not only available, but also and most importantly, useful to its recipients?

This paper introduces “atoms”, “molecules” and “radicals” as fundamental notions in component object-oriented programming. Since atoms can communicate only when linked, their behavioural characteristics are discussed. Links may exist between atoms in different sites. An implementation of this approach concerning educational software development is given and its emerging benefits are presented.

In learning environments, knowledge exploration and exploitation play a more important role than simple information acquisition. The usage of hypermedia for information modelling and exploitation forms, therefore, a challenging area for educational applications. In this study, we present a model for the representation of information on a hypermedia network, stressing the semantics of the information pieces and the relationships among them. This model allows the tutor to customize the available information according to the needs of her course of students, and it empowers the learner in constructively interacting with the offered information, in modifying and in enhancing it according to her understanding, echoing her conclusions and mirroring her conceptual model of old and derived knowledge on a personalized version of the hypermedia network.

This theoretical paper makes a case for the importance of Control Technology in the development of exploratory software for education. Certain principles concerning both the design and the pedagogy for the use of such software are set against specific properties of Control Technology. It is argued that enactive representation of ideas, understanding of subject-matter principles, use of the notion of variable at different levels of abstraction and notions concerning real world functionalities may well be supported by Control Technology, even to an extent which renders it an essential feature of exploratory systems.